List of Endorsements for Vassula Ryden and True Life In God roman catholic testimony

Places

Perhaps this is the most immediately accessible aspect of a pilgrimage. One visits places that were important in the history and experience of the Church and the wider pilgrimage through time and space. Everyone's reflections on these will be different, but for each of us one or two of these places will have a special impact. It was captivating to see the tombs in Cappadocia, where Christians hid in times of trouble. The landscape was like nothing I have ever seen before.

But what struck me most was the house of Mary in Ephesus. A number of people talked about the effect of this place. I did not know what I was looking for, although one of the ways in which the True Life in God messages have changed me is to open my eyes to the importance of Mary, our Lord's Mother. To go on pilgrimage is to know that one's views are going to evolve, be clarified and sometimes completely change. I had always known, as an Anglican, that She was important theologically. I had always treasured Her title of Theotokos. But it was other priests and people who talked about their closeness to Her rather than me. I was a little bemused by this, and thought that perhaps it was just part of the psychological profile; a way of interacting with the feminine perhaps.
Then I found in the messages how vivid, alive, important and involved St Mary was. And I realised that it should no longer be a matter of personal preference, but should become something much stronger in my prayers and my relationship with the Lord. Her house and the place it was set added strongly to this developing awareness. There was a particular strength of colour in the place. The air was a little more luminescent, it seemed to me. The grass had a lusciousness that was out of the ordinary. It was fertile and rich and deep and vibrant. The Eucharist was particularly joyful. This was not a matter of group dynamics; it was entering into a deeper place in God, in a way that is simply given. That place gave it; which of course means our Lady gave it. The place does not provide exclusive closeness to our Lord and His Mother, but it shows to what depths we are being called. And perhaps by our prayers and attention, we ourselves can allow Her and our Lord to make the places we are set in wider and more luxuriant gateways into the Kingdom.
Ever since I knew we were coming to Izmir, Ephesus, I have been hearing in my mind an echo of the chant 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians'. It's clear from Scripture and history that Ephesus was a magnificent place, understandably full of its own importance. Walking down the main street, my admiration for St Paul grew immeasurably. To arrive here with the Gospel and take on all this power, wealth and vested interest, and to become so threatening to them as Acts describes, as well bringing people to an experience of the risen Christ.... what courage and what holiness.

Patmos was the most moving of all for me. It may have been my imagination, but I felt as through there was a grey veil over Turkey, and it began to lift as we moved towards the Greek islands. It felt like metaphysics rather than atmospherics, but whatever it was, it was real and much more than the weather.
Shortly after being converted as a young law student I had met an Anglican priest who told me of how deep an experience of renewal he had experienced when he had gone to Patmos and sat in St. John's cave and read the Apocalypse in Greek. One day, I thought, I want to do that. The day had finally come, 30 years later.
And so another change the pilgrimage effected; relationship with the last book in the Bible. In academic theological circles, it has long been assumed that the Apocalypse was not written by the same person who wrote the fourth Gospel; and if John the beloved disciple wrote the fourth Gospel, then another John wrote the apocalyptic. But my experience on Patmos has started to inform my outlook again on the dynamics of the kingdom of heaven.
The argument goes that the style of writing, of grammar, vocabulary, the grasp of Greek itself, is very different between the two texts. I learnt now of St John's secretary, known in tradition even if not trusted in academia. The possibility that some of the responsibility for this belongs to John's amanuensis, who did the writing, restored the book to me as a source of revelation and inspiration. It has been put back on my theological map. More important even than that, was my discovery that in certain parts of the TLIG messages our Lord quotes widely from the Apocalypse. My theological mind has been changed. If Jesus is right, I must be wrong. And I find myself becoming attuned through the messages to a new taste for metaphor and hyperbole that I already recognised as an accent of our Lord's in the Gospel, but which is particularly vivid in the TLIG messages.
And my imagined view of the cave had been all wrong! I had seen it as a traditional cave on sea shore. Instead it was more like a womb in the hillside.
Prayer

I found something of a shift taking place in my experience of the concelebrated Eucharist. The first experience had been astonishment that such a thing could happen in front of my eyes. To see a Cardinal Archbishop reverently sharing in the Eucharist presided over by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem was more moving than I can find words for; a healing of so much misunderstanding and antagonism.
On the last pilgrimage of 2005, I saw these celebrations as a futuristic prophetic witness of what God wanted, but might only make available in the Church at some long distant time in the future. This time I saw them as utterly normal. It was what we did more regularly in our denominational fragmentation that was the aberration; this togethernerness around the altar was the Church. This was normal. This was more real. At last, like a Christmas day when a family that had been scattered to the four corners of the earth and out of touch with each other too long, came home to sit around one table and celebrate. We are not the Church without each other.
Inevitably the TLIG pilgrimage raises the question of how right it is to suspend the theological questions that constitute the road towards sacramental unity. In the messages we find that the Lord reverses our preoccupation with the theology. When the Eucharist was celebrated each day with the different faces of the Church, Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican, all infused by the Holy Spirit, the answer became so clear: around the altar first. Instead of the Eucharist and our sacramental theology and Church politics being the determining issues, here instead was a healed Church; our Lord's Body restored: the glory of the separate strands woven together as He became present amongst us in the bread and the wine, and in the devotion, adoration and love. These daily Eucharists turned a theological viewpoint into the foretaste of the Kingdom of heaven.

Each celebration had its own flavour of delight. But the two for me that held the most intensity were at St. Mary's house in Ephesus where the air and ground was charged with a sweetness that flowed into our prayers, and at Pentecost on Patmos where standing above the cave in which St John was given a glimpse of the future of time and space, drawn together in our Lord's purposes, we too were given a glimpse of the Church drawn prophetically together in the Lord's purposes, become one in the Eucharist, drawn together by the centripetal energy of love.

But there is a cost in this. Now at home, when the Eucharist is offered, I look round and say, where is the rest of the Church?
Purgation

Something happens when one reads the messages. I have become aware of some internal work taking place. Perhaps it is because they are a conversation with the Lord, and in any conversation the heart is opened up in dialogue. And if opened in dialogue, one is never exactly the same person after the conversation that one was before: however infinitesimally small, a change has taken place.
During the pilgrimage this process seemed to be sped up. My mind, which earns its living as an academic as well as a priest was brought captive to the adoring heart in a way that reverses the normal pattern of life for me. For some time now, I have been pondering on how the mind and the heart should relate to each other in discipleship. My clue should have been found in the Orthodox aphorism that one is to come before the Real God with the real Self, with the mind in the heart.

I found during this pilgrimage that many of my normal views were changing fast. The heart had priority. The mind has a job to do, and I love it. But the priority was the heart, and the mind was invited to stand in the heart, enclosed by the heart. In worship, the mind steadily quietens as the heart becomes the dominant partner. Something in the pilgrimage evoked the heart in a particularly stirring way. It may have been being in the company of the whole Church - it may have been so much prayer preceding it - it may have the potency of the united Church in love and worship in such a unique way; but it had the effect of speeding up the inner cleansing that the presence of God brings.
People

One of the most exhilarating aspects of a pilgrimage is the expectation of the people the Lord will send us to and send to us. Each of the two TLIG pilgrimages have etched people in my memory quite as much as places. So, casual words at a meal can become incisive words, sculpted by the Holy Spirit, that speak to a situation that one hardly knew even required addressing. The pilgrimage almost takes the form of a drawn out confession in which things get shared, absolved, and processed into the dynamics of the Kingdom of heaven. There was such a lot of wisdom. And even in less charged conversations there was a flow of love and intimacy and kindness that decorated the days. Without recounting the conversations themselves it is not easy to give a flavour of how the days seemed to have this benign intensity of encounter. Perhaps most of all, there was this comfort that one's longing to love the Lord, to encounter Him and to stay close to Him, was more normal that the routine of every day life away from these companions sometimes suggested.

Throughout my Christian life I have been so delighted when the presence of Christ leaps out of the eyes of someone who carries him in their heart. In this pilgrimage, one of the strongest memories will be one or two fellow priests, particularly those whose English was poor or non-existent, but with whom I felt a profound bond of love, and a very deep respect as I saw how much of Jesus they carried in their eyes, and minds and hearts. This was the unity of the Church, the charism of Christ. This was my food for the journey of this True Life in God pilgrimage as well as the other one that is the gift of my life.

—The Reverend Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden (LLB, BA, MTh, DPhil)

A Personal Reflection from the True Life In God Ecumenical Pilgrimage in 2007

Senior Chaplain and Lecturer in the Psychology of Religion at the University of Sussex,

Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Chichester,

Diocesan Advisor on New Age Religions,

Member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

LUTHERAN TESTIMONIES
I have been asked to speak from a Protestant point of view about the Unity of the Church and Our Lady. First I must say something about being a Protestant or Lutheran.
The Church of Sweden as a whole was severed from the Church of Rome and the Pope during the Reformation in the sixteenth century. It was the king who wanted to be the sole ruler of his country and he did not want any interference from abroad, that is from the Pope and the bishops who really had a good deal also of worldly power.
The teachings of Martin Luther suited the king's purposes very well. The king took the place of the Pope. From Germany, the mainland of the reformation, was imported the most important of the reformation confessions - the Augsburg Confession, which was critical of abuses in the late medieval Church but was otherwise very traditional, with no intention of teaching anything new, but only being a witness to the faith of the one, holy, catholic (also Roman) and apostolic Church. The Augsburg Confession is today considered, by the official Catholic and Lutheran Ecumenical Commission, to have a catholic intention and an ecumenical will.
There certainly was a great change of the Church in Sweden and for the faithful in the reformation time, but there was also a certain continuity. Some priests and bishops left the country, but some stayed and saved what could be saved.
After the turmoil of the reformation there was just one Church in Sweden. There still were bishops and priests, who by now could be married. The Mass was celebrated, but it was in Swedish instead of Latin and the people could now communicate also from the chalice. Mary and the saints soon disappeared. And so did the monasteries, often by violence. The Bible was translated and there was catechetical work in the schools. For three hundred years there was no alternative. Being a Swede meant being a Lutheran.
Today, despite a radical secularisation, most Swedes belong to the Church which is no longer governed by the king but by democratically voted politicians and their parties. I cannot call myself a Protestant or a Lutheran, but I belong to the Church of Sweden.
I don't think the reformation in Sweden, from a religious point of view, could be justified or was necessary or for the good of the Church, but I can see some good things in it, despite the undisputedly bad things, and also what these good things came to mean for the future.
The Bible, read within the horizon of the old tradition and the Augsburg Confession, was kept as the first and last authority for the faith. This is what preserved the Church in Sweden as a fairly orthodox Christian Church, despite its severance from Rome. But you can imagine what happens today when the Bible, at least in practice, is no longer an authority and if it is taken notice of at all, it is interpreted according to the opinions of the day.
In the example of the Church of Sweden you can see, both positively and negatively, the vital necessity of the unity of the Church, both in space and time, being in communion with all the other local Churches all over the world, in the bishops unity with the Bishop of Rome, but also being in communion with the saints of all times, which means an active remembrance of the tradition. When a Church both has lost its memory and is cut away from the universal Church it is exposed to the pressure of the world and modern secular opinion without the God-given defence and corrective. I believe only the reunion with Rome could save and preserve the Church of Sweden as a Christian Church.
This is said as an example. Now something more general about Christian Unity. There certainly are many things that keep all Christians together, also from different denominations. We believe in and pray to the same triune God. We believe in the incarnation of God the Son. We all believe in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are baptized with the same baptism, Even if all Christians can't go to communion together we believe that we receive and are joined to the one and same body of Christ in the different churches. With slight variations we share the same beliefs. Isn't that enough? Our Lord prays to the Father, in his priestly prayer in St. John's seventeenth chapter and says: "May they all be one ... so that the world may believe it was You who sent me."(v.21)
The unity that Jesus prays for is not only a spiritual unity, but a visible unity in this visible world, "that the world may believe". The Church certainly is an instrument in God's hands for the salvation of the world. It is God's Church. He has made it according to his plan and for his purposes. That the Church should be one and visibly one is certainly part of the founder's will and intention. The visible unity belongs to the nature of the Church and is very important - a top priority. Visible unity demands a visible center of unity. For the local community there is the parish priest. For the diocese the bishop. For the patriarchate there is the patriarch. And for the whole fold, for the universal Church, there is the Pope.
That there should be a pope is part of Christ's plans for his Church. This is not what was in dispute from the beginning by the reformers, only the misuse of the papal power. That there is and should be a petrine primacy is clear from the gospels. And as certain as there is an apostolical succession from the apostles to the bishops, there is a petrine succession from St. Peter to his followers on the apostolic throne in the Church of Rome.
Can a Protestant really say so? There are liberals who wouldn't, because they would say the papacy is part of a patriarcalistic structure. There are others who would reiterate the confessional formulas from the sixteenth century and would eventually say the pope is the antichrist. But if by 'Protestant' you mean a person who wants to be true to the Bible, read with the glasses of the old orthodox and catholic tradition, a Protestant certainly could say that the papacy is instituted by Christ.
In the papal encyclical letter from 1995, "Ut Unum Sint", John Paul II asks the non-Roman Catholic Church leaders to consider with him the forms in which the Petrine Primacy could best serve its mission, "that they all may be one ... so that the world may believe .." With regard to the Church of Sweden and the Anglican Churches this invitation should have been very interesting three years earlier, but in 1995 there had already happened things in these churches that made dialogue seem impossible.
The ecumenical dialogue between The Church of Sweden and Rome was for some years, between 1989 and 1993 very promising. The Swedish archbishop declared from the high altar in St. Peter's in the presence of John Paul II: "The moment has come to declare that the denunciations from the time of the reformation are no longer valid." The Pope visited Sweden and Cardinal Cassidy the head of the Papal secretariat of Christian Unity wanted an examination of and a dialogue about the apostolic succession in the Churches of Finland and Sweden, to see what was needed for a full recognition.
In the question of the important reformation doctrine of "Justification by faith" a consensus has been reached between Rome and the Lutherans. A dialogue at least as promising was also going on between Rome and the Church of England. But in both cases it came to an end because of new divisive developments. John Paul II declared at Pentecost 1994 that the Church has no right whatsoever to ordain women for the priesthood and that this decision is definitive for all the faithful in the Church. Only four and a half months later the Bishops and other leaders in the Church of Sweden declared that "You cannot be ordained to the priesthood unless you acknowledge women as priests."
The Lutheran World Federation declared that they would not be without or sacrifice women priests for the sake of unity. After this, two women have been made bishops in Sweden and more women than men are ordained and on their way to ordination. There is also a very vocal feminist theology, which makes new interpretations of the faith and also, of morals. This development has made a total relativism necessary. You cannot criticize and say that it is not according to the Bible. They will answer: It is just pictures and symbols and anything will do. You could just as well say that God is our mother as our father.
This development (in Sweden and England and also in other countries) has made divisions within the Churches of Sweden and England seem necessary and groups are now trying to find their way. The eyes are of course on Rome. The situation is felt to be so serious for the Church of Sweden that many people ask whether it will survive at all. My personal feeling is that only being with the Church which Christ has built on Peter could save us from being transformed into something else than a Christian Church or from annihilation. Only a Church in communion with Peter could rightly put its trust in the promise of Christ: "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it" (Mt,16:18)
Our Holy Mother Mary is together with the Pope, by the typical Protestant, considered to be what is typically Catholic, and therefore to be shunned. The Pope was by one blow of the sword severed from the Church in Sweden. Mary probably remained in the hearts of the faithful of the first reformation-generation. That was a thing the king couldn't do anything about. But as the Rosary was forbidden and most of the Marian statues were removed, neither was there any place for our lady in the Protestant Swedish hearts. You can only speculate about what this has meant. To live without the Mother Our Lord has given to his Church.
Typically enough in liberal Protestantism Jesus is not Immanuel, that is God with man, but he is man with God and that is what Mary in reality is. To live without Mary as mother and ideal has made Protestant Christianity more of a teaching to understand, than a life to live. The Church in the reformation became more of a school than a place for prayer and adoration. At the same time it must be said that Mary wasn't banished from the Church's teaching, although her place was very much in the background.
So you can find in the confessional writings, in the hymns and in the writings of Martin Luther, sentences that in one way or other affirm the teaching of all the Marian dogmas, although not as dogmas. This, together with other similar catholic elements, has not been without consequence for a Marian renaissance in the Church of Sweden and it has also made it possible to remain in the Church of Sweden with a Catholic faith, without a conflict with the official teaching.
As there are no problems with Peter and the pope, there are no difficulties for a biblical Protestant, of what our old ecumenical archbishop Nathan Sderblom called the evangelical-catholic tradition, to share the catholic and orthodox beliefs about Our Lady. The problem with present day Protestants is that very many of them, I speak first of all about the Church of Sweden but perhaps it could be said also about Lutherans and Anglicans in Western Europe and the USA, that they don't seem any longer to believe in Gods revelation nor in the Bible as the Word of God. But if The Word of God is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path, it will lead you to honour and bless Mary.
We can take it for certain that all of Our Lord's actions and words had a meaning, not just for the singular situation in which they were performed or uttered, but were meant for the Church he founded and therefore had a universal meaning and were to be valid until the end of time. Therefore it is very natural to see that Jesus, from the Cross, gave Mary to be the mother not only of John, but of all the apostles and of all the Church in all times and places.
Next we are led by the word of God to see with John "the great sign which appeared in heaven: a woman adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown". Of course this is Mary. She is alive, She is taken up to heaven with her body and crowned to be the Queen of heaven and earth. We can turn to her and ask for her motherly care and her prayers for us. Mary is the Mother of the Church, but she is also The Church - Our Mother. She is a personification of the Church. In her everything that we are waiting for is already fulfilled and she is already there, where we hope to meet her and her Son, in heaven.
In this way I could go on, from the Bible to the Catholic dogma. And in the case of, for example the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, where it isn't absolutely self-evident, from the Bible, that "Gratia Plena" - "full of grace" - means that there was not ever any place for sin in Mary, I am fully confident that the Holy Spirit has led the Church to the complete truth according to the promise of Jesus. (Jn,16:13)
Among the many titles of our Lady and among all the things She is, let us ask her to be, for the Church, the Mother of Unity. That unity which Jesus prayed for and which seems to be so very difficult, sometimes even impossible. Let us confide it to her care and to her prayers, that it may come soon, at that time and in that way which is according to the will of God.
I have also been asked to say why I support the messages of True Life in God. If somebody had told me about Vassula before I myself had heard her or had read the messages, I would probably have been uninterested, supposing it was another silly sect. I would not have said it was impossible with prophesies, revelations or messages like these, but I never had met anything like it. But since I for the first time heard Vassula in Rome in march 1995 I have been convinced that it is all true.
Perhaps I could say that I recognized the voice, I was very moved and had tears in my eyes. Since then I have read the messages and I have never come across anything that sounded strange or foreign to what I have learned from the Bible and the tradition of the Church. What has meant most to me is of course the intimacy of the messages. The important position of Mary. The centrality of the unity of the Church around the Pope and also the admonitions to be one with John Paul II. As you may have understood, I think I have seen instances of that apostasy, which Jesus has spoken of in the messages. What is not unimportant to me is also the fact of Vassula not being formally a Roman Catholic, but living a Catholic life and having the catholic faith. That is my situation also and with me many in the Church of Sweden.

—Rev. Sverker Tronet, Lutheran Pastor, Jerusalem, May 1998

“… we need to hear voices like Vassula’s… God is calling us to be the disciples and the prophets of this time. And the good news is that God chooses average, ordinary and common people to do the extraordinary…”

—Dr. Bob Edgar, Former National Secretary of the Council of Churches and now CEO of “Common Cause”: